


The Old Church Doors

by Lilly_White



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M, History, Immigration, Magic, Racial Discrimination, Sector 5 church, The Ancients - Freeform, erasure, materia affinity, materia smuggling, nomads, the Cetra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:51:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if it was social injustice that lead to the Cetra’s supposed extinction, rather than a vague dwindling out? This is an exploration of the dynamics between settlers and nomadic Cetra, told by Ifalna to Gast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Church Doors

“You don’t have to go into a lot of detail, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Ifalna smiled faintly, crossing her legs and staring straight at him. “But who is going to go into detail, if not me?”

They said she was his most ambitious project yet. His greatest discovery, as a researcher. As if she was made of the same stuff as the old reptile bones and dusty, dented shields that the Research Department stacked high in their storage rooms.

But the truth was, Gast hadn’t found her – she’d found him. One day, she had come to the university where he taught, hands clasped behind her back, face radiant as she stood in the doorway and looked at him as though she’d found her long-lost brother. She had better knowledge of his published work than any of his critics did, more knowledge on the Cetra race than any of his peers or colleagues did, and she didn’t even have a diploma to show for it.

Of course, she waited for a while, took the time to establish a bond of trust before dropping the bomb of her true identity on him. The way she had so expertly concealed her intimate connection to what Gast saw as merely an area of study, only reinforced his doubts regarding the falsehoods that most scholars published. That the Cetra had been long extinct – long enough for it to be accepted that the non-magical folk might tell their history in a way that benefited them. That they were a mysterious, exotic race, shrouded in centuries of erasure and mysticism. It had come to point where the word Cetra did not bring to mind any human qualities at all – and by her simple presence in a room, by her recognizable features and entirely modern attitude, she would’ve thrown centuries of prejudices right back into every single scholar’s face if she declared herself to everyone she met. 

Gast had watched her prove her lineage, taking a Fire materia into her hands and casting a flame about as huge as the Midgar Zolom over their heads. He’d asked if there were many more like her, in hiding among the non-magical folk, and she’d stared at him with red fire in her eyes. The last Cetra she’d seen were her parents, and that was ages ago now. They were dead, she added. She never lost her smile when she spoke, whether was about the past, about pain, or about seeing her own parents die right in front of her.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Gast said. He clicked on the tape recorder, reclining in his chair and gazing at her. “Oh – do you want some coffee, by the way?”

“That would be lovely, professor,” Ifalna laughed, and Gast got up to switch on the coffee machine.

“Gaia, don’t call me that,” he called over his shoulder. “I haven’t heard you call me professor since I ‘contaminated’ the Forgotten City with land surveyors. Must I infer that I did something wrong?”

“Well, we’re recording, aren’t we?” Ifalna said. “I wouldn’t want to get too familiar if this is supposed to be publishable material.”

“Is that how it’s going to be, then?”

Ifalna grinned. “Someone has to remind you to remain professional, sir.”

“I see.” A moment later the coffee mug was between her hands, and his fingers were sliding briefly over hers. He always looked away from her face when he leaned too close; she always looked straight at him. “Let’s start.”

He cleared his throat, before saying towards the recording device; “On the subject of the sedentism of the Cetra.”

He nodded at Ifalna, and she began talking.

“This is a matter that has long been erased from popular history, and we must bring it back into the light if the modern existence of my culture and the violence that was dealt to us are to be acknowledged.

“Contrarily to what scholars believe, we did not die out after the great plague. Over the centuries, as the magical ability of the sedentary folk waned, they took away the credibility of our pilgrimage, and encouraged younger generations to settle down and enjoy an easier, more luxurious way of life. The settlers claimed land and forbade us from trespassing on what they called ‘private property’; they proclaimed that our way of life was averse to basic human rights; they propagated the belief that we were drugged, primitive mystics. And soon enough, allured by the promise of comfort and easier living standards, our younger generations began deserting us. The first mass urban exodus was approximately 200 years ago…”

###### 

The young Cetra hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, head down. Nighttime shouldn’t have felt so perilous to girls like her who knew a thing or two about self-defense, but she had one thing she couldn’t defend herself against – the presence of illegal materia shards, sitting at the bottom of her bag.

The town of Alfheim had long remained the most progressive towards Cetra immigrants, which was why she’d picked it when she’d broken away from her family and chosen to settle. But things had slowly changed over the last decade, with the creation of a new government in the town of Midgar that would preside over the entire region and unite the different city-states under federal law. She had always practiced magic in the privacy of her house, but even that had become illegal now. And the police were beginning to wage an intense war against the trafficking of materia, going to the extremes of kicking any known holders out of the region and blacklisting them.

But she was hungry, and she’d be damned if she bowed her head like the rest and accepted the abysmal salary she obtained from her waitress job. She pulled her hood lower over her head, making her way towards the stone bridge where she usually did her business.

Thin silhouettes detached themselves from the shadows as she walked under the bridge. One of them wasn’t wearing contacts – his eyes glowed fiercely in the dark, and the Cetra girl felt her heart lurch upon seeing them.

“What have you got?”

They spoke in the ancient tongue; they always made a point to. She felt the usual warmth of familiarity enveloping her as she stepped into their circle.

“Bahamut shards.”

“Bahamut?” they whispered, huddling closer. “How in Gaia’s name did you manage to get that?”

“Lifted it from a jewellery shop,” she said. “Those idiots must’ve thought they were just rubies. They don’t even test their gems any more – just stamp prices on the ones that look the part.”

She’d felt it through the glass of the display booth; the raw power of creatures born at the creation of the world, shrieking from their prison of silver.

“Fucking settlers.”

“But, Ada,” one of the Cetra said, and she glared at him. “Sorry. But – can we really summon the Bahamut with such tiny shards?”

“I think we can. Otherwise, we could always come together if we ever want to use it,” Ada said. “It’s not like we’re going to get many occasions to use it, anyway.”

“They’re planning to repurpose our goddamn church soon, aren’t they?” the Cetra with the naked eyes said, and they all looked at him. “We could always use it then, to protect what little we have left of ours in this town.”

“Good call.”

###### 

It was several months before the small group dared to come together again and trek out to the country, riding chocobos far out into the wilderness. They assembled the shards and stood in a circle around the small crimson pile, holding hands and closing their eyes as they invoked the power in the raw pieces. There was a shiver, coursing through their bones as the Planet whispered through their bodies, rocked them with a sigh, and their hearts were heavy as they felt the accusation, the betrayal that filled them up. They felt ancestral eyes on them as they tried to invoke what should no longer have been accessible to them, as Cetra who had chosen to settle, who had chosen to abandon their mothers and their Planet for the sake of material comfort.

But then there was a distant roar crackling above their heads, and the sound of wings dragging up the air. They looked up and found eyes of an old god staring back at them from high above, gargantuan wings flapping as the Bahamut gazed down at them. It made circles in the sky, emitting piercing whines as though it were expressing its disapproval of them.

Ada was the first to break the circle as the others stood petrified, and they shouted at her to be careful as she lifted a hand up into the air.

The Bahamut glided through the air effortlessly despite its great bulk, and the high grasses flattened under the wind as it lowered itself towards the ground. And the Cetra watched, speechless, as the Bahamut stomped down onto the earth, reaching its great head forwards so that its snout shot blasts of hot air against Ada’s palm, acknowledging her as worthy of its recognition.

###### 

Ada passed down her shard to her daughter, and afterwards it was given to her granddaughter – passed down in the form of a necklace to avoid detection. By then the sprawling residential districts that had been growing around the small towns of the Midgarian region had connected them, forming a ring around the capital. Alfheim as well as the neighbouring towns were starting to be seen as Midgarian suburbs rather than towns in and of themselves, and the Cetra took the blame for the loss of identity the towns were going through, for no other reason than they made the perfect scapegoats, as always.

Ada’s granddaughter Maeve was married to a settler. She hadn’t joined the resistance movement that regularly gathered in the streets and protected the local Cetra church from being pulled down or repurposed. She never joined any societies, never took up any defamatory cry for justice, never partook in any of the annual rituals her mother had taught her. Because she was scared.

She was scared, because she couldn’t hide who she was like her parents could. Now, blood testing could determine whether or not a person had magical ability, and Cetra had their blood type stamped on their ID cards so that there could be no hope of fooling any employer to get higher than the minimum wage, or persuading law enforcers not to be suspicious of her as a potential violent magic user and illegal materia trafficker. Settlers began to resent those Cetra who wished to mingle with them, seeing it as a subterfuge to diminish the percentage of magical ability and marry into respectability – there was a growing prejudice against interracial marriage, that even Maeve’s own husband was a victim to.

But when the news came that the Cetra youth had made one more stand around the church to prevent it from being torn down, and were shot to death for standing in the way of the authorities, she looked down at her hands, and found them bloody with the guilt of passive complicity.

She stepped into the church one day while they were erecting scaffolds all around it in order to pull down the roof. She plucked a flower from one of the cracks in the stone, and put in her hair.

Then she sat in the centre of the nave, pulled the necklace from her throat, and invoked Bahamut.

###### 

“… As the segregation became more and more official, scientists synthesized a drug that could suppress magical ability,” Ifalna said. “It became extremely popular. Cetra were so willing to erase themselves from society in order to enjoy equal rights that they accepted the steadily growing historical erasure, too. The settlers didn’t want to acknowledge the blood on their hands, and the Cetra were happy to go undetected – it’s frighteningly easy to fudge the truth when no one wants to admit their crimes, and no one thinks to educate their children in the cultural heritage that would make pariahs of them.”

“There are religious edifices scattered around Midgar that we have never been able to source,” Gast said. “But why would Cetra need a church to practice their spiritual rituals?”

“We don’t really need a church. I think it was built to satisfy the need for community; a place where Cetra could come together and celebrate our rituals without disturbing the settlers. Besides, it was frowned upon to make public shows of spiritual and magical capacity – it spawned misunderstanding and jealousy on the settlers’ part. At that time there weren’t the bypass technologies we have now, after all.”

“Can I ask – what happened to the church you spoke of?”

“Oh, it’s still here,” Ifalna said, still smiling that deceptively soft smile. “It’s one of the only buildings that remains of old Alfheim – now known as Sector 5.”

“So they didn’t tear it down after all?”

“There was no need for that once the younger, non-magical Cetra generations forgot their affiliation to it. It was simply marked as a historical edifice by one of the last self-aware Cetra historians, for its protection. And then it was forgotten.”

“You’ll have to take me there.”

“Of course.”

###### 

Her limbs cut snowy lines across the old floorboards. Their breaths disturbed the holy silence, reverberating around the vaulted ceiling, and she swiped dust angels onto the wood as she moved with him.

There was no one to see them, except perhaps the glitter of long-lost magic, hanging like insubstantial drapes around them as they held each other painfully close. Pieces of crumbled pillars surrounded them, and the floorboards were half eaten away by time and negligence, but for a moment it was their palace, their own private empire. And she glowed – oh, she glowed like the queen that she should’ve been.

But when she straddled him, he saw the glint of a ghost in her eyes, trailing white histories through her – dripping the blood of generations down the walls of her being. There were tears on her cheeks and he didn’t know what to do. Tentatively, he reached up to wipe them away, but she shook her head and wiped them away herself.

###### 

The old doors apparently never gave way, but Aeris was a stubborn kid, everybody knew that. The other slum children would ask her what was so special about that old church, half-hidden as it was under heaps of junk, but she never gave any other response than the fact that it was her church. She’d singled it out and nobody could say anything against that. She got into trouble for trying to ward off drunkards who would piss against the church walls, shaking sticks at them, a furious little girl in pink trying to drive away grown men with shaved skulls and pockets full of knives. 

People stopped making fun of her when she finally managed to inch the doors open, a feat that nobody had managed up till then, not even the adults that had been intrigued enough to try. The doors had given way with an ominous croak, and the interior of the church had filled up her eyes as she stood there, mouth parted, small hands gripping the door edge.

Stained glass windows transformed the white neon light, throwing a myriad of dancing colours on the floorboards. Aeris walked in, her shoes disturbing the dust and leaving a trail of squeaky-clean footsteps. When she stepped into the first puddle of colour, she felt a giddy surge of sensation - her eyes rose up to the ceiling as the goosebumps erupted over her skin.

 _My child,_ echoed a voice in the chambers of her heart, _my child, my child,_ and she knew she was home.


End file.
